The other tenor role is more herculean: Florestan, sung at the Met by David Butt Philip with ardent tirelessness matched only by his dramatic bravery. He enters with a high G, exposed once the orchestra drops out after a beat. There isn’t a fermata in the score, but Philip held the note, less to show off than to trace an arc of pathetic anguish to full-voiced despair.
René Pape was back as the warden Rocco, which he sang when Flimm’s staging was new. After a quarter century, Pape’s sound may be a bit smaller, but it was still warm, as well as appropriate for a loyal worker willing, against his better judgment, to follow the sadistic orders of Pizarro. In that role, the bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny had a loud, reverberating speaking voice, similarly penetrating when he sang, that slowly revealed itself as posturing bluster; he remains one of the great acting talents at the Met.
In Flimm’s production, Pizarro is a vaguely defined tyrant who answers to and fears a higher, distant authority. It’s deliberately unspecific, with details plucked from oppressive regimes of recent history: cold Soviet architecture; discarded shoes piled as if in a concentration camp; khaki uniforms of a banana republic; a monument, eerily of our moment, that may or may not be giving a Nazi salute.
Beethoven’s opera is beautiful if flawed as theater, with political idealism that is more admirable than resonant. But Flimm, who died in 2023, found a way to make it work and, most impressively, speak to the audiences of each revival in different ways.
During the Iraq War, the toppling of a dictator’s monument in the finale felt ripped from the headlines. With a rightward swing around the world today, there seems to be a warning in its “Zone of Interest”-like juxtaposition of the mundane and the monstrous; flowers are trimmed and dinner is served as prisoners look on, in a portrait of complicity and opportunism.
Most chillingly, Flimm turns Beethoven’s celebratory finale into a warning. The officers who have just obeyed Pizarro now cheer his execution, while members of the public menacingly wave knives in the air. Flimm, a German born during World War II, knew that tyrants are dangerous, but so are people who are all too happy to do as they’re told.
Fidelio
Through March 15 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.
